


The Ash in Your Mouth

by acedie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Drabble Collection, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Whump, sxvxrxssnape's Snapetober 2020
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:33:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27127256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acedie/pseuds/acedie
Summary: A collection of Snape-centric one-shots and drabbles, inspired by floralandfading's Snapetober 2020 prompts.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: Snapetober





	1. insomnia

**Author's Note:**

> Published in no particular order! May or may not complete the month.

Of all the nights to lie awake.

The walls are thin on Spinner’s End. He can hear his mother’s breathy sighs, his father’s groans. He presses one ear against the hard mattress and throws the pillow and his arm over the other. 

It would be a blessing if he suffocates.

He tells himself that it’s better than the yelling, the crying.  _She’s_ been better lately. She cooks, she cleans, she kisses Tobias on the cheek. But she can only sustain the effort for so long and then it’s back: the crying, the yelling. The muffled sobs and the stifled groans that sound almost the same. 

He knows how to handle them like that. He knows how to act. He knows to hide, to make himself small and quiet and dim, and he knows when it’s safe to creep out and bring his mother a plate of biscuits and a glass of milk, knows to savor the thin smiles she saves for him.

This affection, though. The fire between his parents that flares and dies. He doesn’t know the rules for how to handle them like this. They aren’t reading their parts in the script.

He presses the pillow down harder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Double drabble!


	2. sectumsempra

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 13 Drabble: Sectumsempra

"Sectumsempra!"

It’s a final, bitter irony to be killed with his own spell. Doubly so for it to happen in the Shrieking Shack, where he has been battered and nearly died already. _Third time’s the charm,_ he thinks, and the little involuntary chuckle comes out as a red gurgle. 

“I regret it,” says Voldemort, inflectionless. Maybe he does, insofar as the shattered remains of his soul allows, because he doesn’t linger. 

Snape is grateful to have at least failed to drive the lamb to slaughter. He has not killed _all_ the Potters. 

But then the boy shows up anyway. Typical.


	3. poisoned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 2: Poisoned
> 
> “just shove a bezoar down their throat”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: animal abuse and death.

He pats himself down before he leaves the house. Wand, house key, wallet. It’s been weeks since Voldemort fell but he can’t shake the paranoia that makes him bring, too, an erumpent flashbang, a bezoar, a vial of dittany, and a styptic bandage. They’re all stuffed into the tatty mackintosh he wears when cloaks won’t do.

He doesn’t believe the cat’s alive at first. He hasn’t seen this one before; black cats, as a whole, do not last long in this part of Cokesworth, and besides, fat King Marmalade, as he thinks of the big orange tom, keeps his harem close as he patrols the yards and gardens and wilds. This won’t be the first time he’s walked past a body in the road. He almost ignores it.

But something draws him. It’s in rough shape, he sees. Dull fur stretched over ribs thrumming in fast, shallow pants, thick foamy spittle obscuring its muzzle. Rat poison, in all likelihood. He used to run with a pack of muggle boys in the neighborhood, at least before they realized he was a sour little freak who wasn’t going to follow them into primary school. One of them had force-fed bromethalin to a stray and they’d all helped corral it until the lethargy set in, and all it could do was stumble and tremble and then seize and die.

He remembers how its suffering had fed something in the deep dark crevices of his soul.

This cat thrashes unexpectedly when he pries open its mouth to shove in the stone. It tears into the soft web of flesh between his thumb and his forefinger but he presses the bezoar into place and clamps down around its muzzle until the thrashing slows, and slows, and slows.

He pulls it carefully to his chest and brings it back home before it can fully recover and run off. There’s a few things in his cupboard he thinks will help.

Here’s at least one thing he can save.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have a fat, supremely fluffy orange tabby and two skinny black cats and I love them all so much, why am I like this, why did I write this


	4. grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 9: Grief.
> 
> Tobias has been withering into nothing for months, and soon there will be nothing left but a jaundiced rotting object.

Tobias has been withering into nothing for months, and soon there will be nothing left but a jaundiced rotting object. The liver copes until it cannot, and there’s nothing more for the doctors to do but pump him full of morphine to keep him insensate, which is a blessing for everyone. 

Severus feels only a hollow, ringing ache. He has not relied on his father for anything for a very long time. But soon, there will be no witnesses left to his childhood. No memories but his own. 

He lets the past slip out of his fingers, and is glad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drabbles are easy, she said. Just a hundred words! Just. Exactly a hundred. Ugh.


	5. scars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snapetober 2020 Day 11: scars
> 
> I basically gave up on this but I do have a couple more of these >.>

“How did you survive, Mr. Snape?” 

He presses a hand to his throat, felling his pulse under thin, tender skin. He pictures the two fat red marks, like a vampire; the thin twin crescents of punctures. 

“I was lucky.” 

“You got bit in the neck by a giant evil snake, how is that lucky?” 

He drops his hand and flashes a bitter smile. 

“A human is ordinarily too large a meal even for a snake of her size. But a magic ‘giant evil snake’? I was lucky that he had not left himself the time to allow her a meal.”


	6. regret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day 19: Regret

The door to Severus Snape’s office was shut tight. To Dumbledore’s eye, it seemed more sculptural than functional, something that was not just sealed, but that had never opened at all.

This was a ridiculous feeling, of course. This was his school. This was the office of a former pupil and current peer, a veteran of the war against Voldemort, a man he might call friend if not for the gulf of years and authority between them. He scratched his chin through his long white beard, debating for a moment whether or not he wanted to leave--and then laughed, and flicked his wand. The feeling of invasion dropped away like scales from his eyes, and he straightened shoulders he had not remembered tensing. 

Just a ward, and an uncommonly subtle one... though that was Severus's style, after all. A whisper that your business wasn't worth disturbing the crypt-like peace of his den in the marshy underground of the school.

Albus rapped a knuckle against the door.

Nothing.

He raps again, and still, nothing in return.

“Severus? I know you're in there, I apologize for not scheduling--”

A click, and sickly yellow firelight crept out from the unsealed doorjamb.

Dumbledore nudged it open with a toe, suddenly reminded of the ghost stories Aberforth used to tell him when they were both boys, in a different world.

Severus's desk faced the door, ringed by an Unseelie rainbow of body parts and plant parts and things that could belong to either category, all floating in jars. The man himself blended into his gloomy cloister: black robes, lank black hair, shadows from the dying fire lying thick against his face.

Dumbledore knew better than to wait for hospitality—there was a visitor’s chair but it looked as though a strong breeze (or a particularly terrified first year’s quaking) would send it into pieces. So he summoned up his favorite poofy armchair and settled in to study his former student.

“My dear boy,” he finally said, “you look terrible.”

Severus shook his head minutely, as if the movement pained him. Something had thumbed dark circles under his eyes, bloodshot already. 

“I'm just drunk, Albus, thank you very much,” drawled Snape in a crackling voice. He lifts a tumbler of Icepear Brandy and the light blue glow turned him sickly green. “I don't think Poppy is going to be very sympathetic.”

“I came to ask you about the unusual number of complaints from your students, Severus. Could you tell me why that is? I hope you haven’t been drinking during school-hours.”

Snape knew better than to make eye contact, which makes Albus all the greedier to know. But he just tapped his forefinger against the heavy wooden desk, and let the fire crackle and fade into ember. 

Albus summoned a globe of fairy light and threw the room back into sharp relief. Snape winced and scrubbed his eyes against the brightness, a bat thrust unflinchingly into the day.

“What's wrong, Severus? I can't help you if you don't--”

“Don't what?" he snapped, slamming his hand down. “Don't inform you of every thought that circles my skull, or every time I visit the loo? Do you really care, Dumbledore, or are you just concerned that if your Potions Master goes mad you'll have to find two new professors? How long before you run out of candidates, Albus? Before you run out of fools who learn too late the dangers of trusting you?”

Dumbledore softened his face. “Why do you think that, Severus?”

“Because you use people,” the sick-faced man spat, “you use them until they're broken and then--”

“Then what?” The Headmaster's eyes flashed. “I toss them out like rubbish? Like I have tossed you out, here into this office, this school, where you continue to teach under my protection, where I continue to trust to your care the safety and education of all the young Magical minds of Britain?”

Severus rubbed his arm.

“Perhaps you shouldn't.” A little boy's petulance. “You know what I've done.”

He finally looked up, and Albus was rewarded with flashes. The fire hissing. Ember light leaking slowly out of the room. Memories of screams and of blood. Of imagined flashes of emerald light, flashes of ember hair, emerald eyes.

“Would it surprise you to learn that we all, even myself, make terrible mistakes? But we cannot live in the rooms of the past.” 

Dumbledore moved to stand next to Severus, twitched both arms toward the man, but in the end only rested one hand on his shoulder. 

“We cannot live with phantasms, illusions of what will never be, or what will never be again. That's a coward's way out, to smother regret and repentance with despair, or to confuse them with one another. It isn't worthy of you, Severus. You are worth more than that.”

He patted the younger man on the back. “Brew up something cheery, won't you? Some Hangover Cure and a cuppa. And next time come to my office.” 

He paused, then smiled.

“I won't even make you book an appointment.”


End file.
